The Inhabited Ruins of Central Europe

Re-imagining Space, History, and Memory

D. Gafijczuk, D. Sayer, D. Gafijczuk,D. Sayer, D. Gafijczuk, D. Sayer

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137305862
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Arte general

Focusing on Central Europe, the volume proposes a new paradigm of how culture works, based on a model of "inhabited ruins" as a space where contradictory elements come together into continually renewed and frequently paradoxical configurations. Examines art, architecture, literature and music.

1

Ruins and Representations of 1989: Exception, Normality, Revolution

Tim Beasley-Murray

1 Ruins I: domino

On 9 November 2009, as part of the ‘Festival of Freedom’ that commemorated the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, 1,000 polystyrene dominoes decorated and painted by German schoolchildren and artists with slogans such as ‘Peace’ and ‘Freedom’ were lined up along a two-kilometer stretch where once the wall stood. Surrounded by crowds and television cameras, former Polish president and Solidarity leader, Lech Wałęsa, pushed the first domino and set off a chain reaction that was meant to symbolize the revolutions of 1989. Amid whooping and cheering the final domino, with inevitable bathos, failed to fall. What was the message of this spectacle and what does it tell us about the meaning of 1989? The domino-topple was mere movement where human agency was reduced to the minimum one hand that set off a process governed not by collective actions or ideas but by the laws of physics. There was nothing here of any content. The conception of freedom that the domino-topple embodied was as minimal as Hobbes’s conception of freedom as unhampered motion (1990: 145). The attempt to symbolize 1989 symbolized vacuity. This chapter will attempt to find grounds for the emptiness of this and other representations of 1989 and hence say something about the experience of living amongst its ruins – here, 1,000 oversized polystyrene dominoes, 999 scattered in urban no-man’s land, and one that stubbornly and forlornly refused to fall.

2 1989 stories I

The Slovak novelist Peter Pišťanek’s Rivers of Babylon, published in 1991, tells the story of Rácz, a peasant from the Hungarian-speaking countryside, who arrives in Bratislava in Autumn 1989 and finds a job stoking up the boilers of the city’s top hotel. With a combination of priapic brutality and Nietzschean will-to-power (and control of the heating in a freezing winter), Rácz rises at meteoric speed to become, by the summer of 1990, the head of a criminal empire with the Hotel Ambassador, the city, and its politicians in his pocket. This riotous and irrepressible novel is a combination of things: a savage subversion of the Bildungsroman and satire of (Slovak) notions of the ethnic and moral purity of the countryside and the corruption and vice of the city – after all, it is Rácz who corrupts the city and not the other way round – and with its cast of ballet-dancers-turned-prostitutes, intellectuals-turned-pornographers, secret policemen-turned-mafiosi and so forth, a Rabelaisian carnival of the birth of Wild-East capitalism (cf. Pynsent 2000). One of the most remarkable things about this book, however, is what it does not portray: Rácz’s rise coincides exactly with the period that sees the fall of the Berlin Wall, mass demonstrations in November 1989 against the Communist regime in Prague and Bratislava, the resignation of the Presidium of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, the election of Václav Havel to the presidency at the end of December, and finally, in June 1990, the first free elections in Czechoslovakia since 1946. None of this appears in the novel. Much of the action of the book occurs on the square immediately in front of the Hotel Ambassador, a square on which (if we are allowed to map the geography of fiction onto its unmistakable real-world equivalent) many of the demonstrations of that tumultuous autumn took place. We may, if we half-close our eyes for a moment, imagine the crowds of earnest demonstrators mingling with Pišťanek’s motley band of Swedish sex tourists, onanistic car-park attendants, and gypsy pickpockets, but Pišťanek does not show us that. This novel is both absolutely about the fall of Communism, the revolution of 1989, and the transition to free-market capitalism and liberal democracy and, at the same time, resolutely unwilling or unable to represent these events.

Something similar can be observed in Wolfgang Becker’s 2003 film, Goodbye, Lenin! Here, in autumn 1989, shortly before the fall of the wall, a middle-aged woman and still faithful Communist Party member happens to observe her son, Alex, being arrested for taking part in an anti-regime protest on the streets of East Berlin. The shock is such that she suffers a heart attack and falls into a coma. While she is motionless in her hospital bed, the world around her changes unrecognizably: the wall comes down; a revolution of consumer culture takes place; and, when she regains consciousness eight months later, the reunification of Germany is imminent. On her return to recover at home, however, such is her fragile state of health that the doctors fear the slightest shock may be fatal. So Alex decides to hide from her the fact that the German Democratic Republic and the everyday world that it inhabited – a world that seemed forever – is no more. He attempts, by means of comic subterfuge, to recreate East Germany within the walls of their flat, keeping a whole way of life on life support. At the end of the film, the mother dies, and it is deliberately left ambiguous as to whether she has in the end seen though her son’s elaborate charade. Three points can be made: first, depending on the shifting perspectives with which we as viewers are encouraged to identify, the changes of 1989 are both shown and not shown, registered and not registered. Second, at least from the mother’s perspective, the seismic event of the Wende is not the shock, which occurs beforehand in the form of her son’s arrest. In fact, we find out that the determinative shock in the mother’s life came ten years earlier when her husband ran off to the West with his lover, a trauma that explains her almost pathological devotion to her socialist homeland. After the heart attack, shock hangs like the sword of Damocles from the ceilings of the mother’s hospital room and flat. Revolution does its eruptive business somewhere else. Third, the real story that the film tells is not the story of how a newly reunified Germany comes into being but rather the story of the creation of an alternative East Germany that Alex simulates in order to hide the reality of what has happened from his mother. This is an East Germany in which a former cosmonaut, Sigmund Jähn, replaces Erich Honnecker as leader, and the regime dismantles the wall to let in refugees fleeing hardship in the West – in short, the East Germany, Alex tells us, that he would have wanted to live in.

How are we to understand the fact that something so central to these fictions is present only in its absence? Speaking of Baudelaire, the poet of the crowd of nineteenth-century Paris, Walter Benjamin notes that ‘the masses had become so much a part of Baudelaire that it is rare to find a description of them in his works’ (2003a: 322). Thus, for example, ‘In the sonnet, “À une passante,” the crowd is nowhere named in either word of phrase. Yet all the action hinges on it, just as the progress of a sailboat depends on the wind’ (2003a: 323). Benjamin explains Baudelaire’s poetic technique – a technique that expresses, without directly representing, urban life – in terms of the nature of the shock that constitutes urban experience and the difficulty consciousness has in registering and giving shape to that experience. In similar fashion, while the outboard motor of Rivers of Babylon appears to be Rácz’s inexhaustible appetite for power, the novel would go nowhere without the revolutionary ‘winds of change’ (to use the title of the Scorpions’ song that provided the soundtrack to German reunification) that have caught its sails. ‘Goodbye, Lenin!’ likewise registers shock, but only indirectly. Both Pišťanek’s and Becker’s fictions show and do not show 1989. They tell its story and they tell other parallel and divergent stories. They are seismographs of its upheavals, but the needles scarcely flicker.

In order to understand this situation, what needs to be examined is the curious nature of 1989 and what it is about the structure of those events that issues in their unrepresentability. Instead of working back from representations of 1989 (or perhaps put better: their absences or non-representations), however, I shall move forward and try to understand the conceptual structure of those events themselves and their conceptual and historical prestructurings. The key, I shall argue, is to see that more than other great upheavals in history, the upheavals of 1989 were dominated not by what we might imagine to be the usual questions of politics – questions of rights, questions of access to the public sphere, questions of equality, whether political or material, and so forth. Rather, the key questions at stake in 1989 were those of the determination of the standards of and the right to a normal life. Its revolution was a revolution in the name of the normal.

It may be argued that most revolutions have a tendency to resist representation. Speaking of Jáchym Topol’s Sestra (1996) – another fictional text where the 1989 revolution is shown, above all, through its absence and one that could stand alongside Pišťanek and Becker – Peter Zusi (2013) talks of a ‘venerable tradition of regarding revolutionary action as inherently unrepresentable.’ Certainly the most powerful and memorable images of the French and Russian revolutions stand in problematic relation to the events that they purport to represent. Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People actually depicts the revolutionary events of July 1830, not of 1789, but historical false memory has indelibly associated it with the French Revolution. Eisenstein’s October was famously based not on the chaotic 1917 storming of the Winter Palace, with its descent into looting and drunkenness, but on the spectacular 1920 mass reenactment with its fireworks and cast of thousands (Kleberg 1993: 44–64). The resistance to representation encountered in revolutionary events stems from their unexpected, turbulent, improvised, exceptional, and indeed miraculous nature. This nature means that processes of image- and myth-making tend to occur at least at one remove. If the exceptionality of revolutionary shock resists representation, normality does the same. Feats and deeds form the stuff of stories, and the normal easily falls under the radar of narration. 1989 was a paradoxical combination of the exceptional and normality, the experience of which might be termed the shock of the normal. This means that 1989 has a double orientation towards unrepresentability. In consequence, representations of 1989 are strange hollow shells: they have the structure of a story – a story of feats and deeds – but since their content is normality, those structures are empty. Indeed, the story of 1989 has to be understood as the story precisely about not telling grand stories.

3 Phusis, nomos, politics

Human beings, as opposed to animals, take part in a bifurcated existence. We live in two worlds. The first world that we inhabit is the world that we have not made. This is a natural world that appears to confront us in its immutability – the sun rose today, and it will rise tomorrow. Insofar as we live in it, we are governed by laws of nature and hence by necessity. The other world that we inhabit is a world of things that we have made. This artificial world is able to confront us in mutability, and its laws are laws that we have made ourselves and hence that we might change.

Such a way of thinking about the human condition – a mode that underpins the thought of a writer like Arendt – may be traced to the conceptual vocabulary of the pre-Socratics. Pre-Socratic thinkers, most notably the Sophists, understood the existence of human beings as structured by an opposition between phusis (nature, the necessary nature of things, including the nature of man) and nomos (law, custom, particularly the artificial and even arbitrary laws and customs of the polis). Antiphon the Sophist, for example, writes: ‘For the dictates of the laws are adventitious, whereas the dictates of nature are inescapable; dictates of the laws, based on agreement as they are, are not natural growths, whereas the dictates of nature, being natural growths, are not based on agreement’ (1990: 294). Pre-Socratic thought was characterized by a disagreement over which sort of law – the laws of nature or those of convention – had determining force over the lives of men and under which sort of law man might be seen to partake of freedom (Kerferd 1981: 111–30). While some thinkers in this debate argued that the laws of convention were more restrictive of man’s freedom than the vagaries of nature, a central legacy of the phusis/nomos debate to the tradition of Western political thought is a conception of the polis as an artificial world of mutability, set apart from natural necessity, and hence a conception of politics as the sphere in which human beings might be best placed to actualize their freedom (cf. Arendt 1998). After all, the polis is the work of human hands, walls that mark out a space for humans to live separate from nature, and thus reveals nature for what it is. Thinkers who draw on this legacy subscribe, more or less explicitly, to the maxim that in politics, when one hears the word ‘nature’ – as opposed to ‘culture’ – one should reach for one’s gun.

Such a conception of politics as a sphere of artificiality and freedom, distinct from necessity and nature, has not gone unchallenged. At the beginning of his ‘Considerations on Representative Government,’ J.S. Mill recognizes two strands in political thought. The first comprises thinkers who, echoing the characterization of politics outlined above, conceive of politics as artifice and of political institutions as instruments that may be altered. By contrast, Mill argues:

To these stand opposed another kind of political reasoners, who are so far from assimilating a form of government to a machine, that they regard it as a sort of spontaneous product, and the science of government as a branch (so to speak) of natural history. According to them, forms of government are not a matter of choice. We must take them, in the main, as we find them. Governments cannot be constructed by premeditated design. They ‘are not made, but grow’. Our business with them, as with the other facts of the universe, is to acquaint ourselves with their natural properties, and adapt ourselves to them. (1991: 205–06)

In this second strand (Mill is thinking here, above all, of Hegel), one observes a conception of politics and its products in which the natural has overgrown the political. Here, that which is made by human beings takes on the qualities of the organic, and the human being is stripped of agency and concomitantly takes her or his place under the sway of necessity.

4 Normality, exception, power

Nature and convention – phusis and nomos – however much this way of thinking, inherited from fifth-century Greece, may still be seen to underlie our modern ideas of politics, this binary, it seems, has undergone a transformation. For in a modernity that has witnessed humankind’s ever-greater domination of nature and ability to intervene, by means of technology, in phenomena that previous generations would have understood as belonging to the natural sphere of necessity, it is no longer clear that a binary that rests on a sense of the irresistible force of nature carries such weight. Rather, it seems that the opposition between phusis and nomos has been supplemented by an allied opposition and rearticulated in its terms: that of normality and exception. These two pairs of terms relate to each other in a curious and antinomic chiasmus. If nomos, with its sense of the regulation of human affairs, stands in relation to normality on the one hand, its affinity with human activity and the human ability to change things allies it with exception on the other. Similarly, while phusis may be seen to possess an affinity with exception, insofar as the moment of exception is one where human beings are delivered up, powerless, to the random acts of the sovereign’s will or to the chaos of natural or other disaster on the one hand, phusis also stands in close relation to the normal and its qualities of stability and necessity on the other.

Power encourages an experience of the artificial world of political and social life as natural, inevitable, permanent, unchangeable, yes, but also as normal. Order, stating its normality, asserts that the status quo is the only possible or, indeed, thinkable present, effecting what Žižek (2002: 544–45) terms a Denkverbot. Once a particular phenomenon attracts to itself the characteristics of normality, our sense that that phenomenon may be changed or eradicated disappears. This is, for example, a central self-legitimating mechanism of liberal capitalism: capitalism projects the notion of an economy based on the principle of exchange an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Prologue: The Day the Wall Came Down (American Surreal)
• Introduction: Delicate Empiricism
• 1 Ruins and Representations of 1989: Exception, Normality, Revolution
• 2 The Ruins of a Myth or a Myth in Ruins? Freedom and Cohabitation in Central Europe
• 3 Democracy in Ruins: The Case of the Hungarian Parliament
• 4 Itinerant Memory Places: The Baader-Meinhof-Wagen
• 5 Edith Doesn’t Live Here Anymore: A Story of Farnsworth House
• 6 Fake Fragments, Fake Ruins, and Genuine Paper Ruination
• 7 How We Remember and What We Forget: Art History and the Czech Avant-garde
• 8 Anxious Geographies – Inhabited Traditions
• 9 Terezín as Reverse Potemkin Ruin, in Five Movements and an Epilogue
• 10 Desert Europa and the Sea of Ruins: The Post-Apocalyptic Imagination in Egon Bondy’s Afghanistan
• 11 History’s Loose Ends: Imagining the Velvet Revolution
• Index